Scapegoating Cornwallis: Who are we to judge history?

When an expedition from New England captured Louisbourg in 1745, no one was more surprised than the New Englanders. The next year, a French fleet under the Duc D’Anville that was sent out to retake the fortress anchored in Bedford Basin, which resulted in countless Mi’kmaq dying from European diseases, writes John Boileau. (LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA)

While conducting research for my 2012 book, Halifax and Titanic, I came across the following quote from Daniel Allen Butler, the American author of another Titanic book:

“There is something horribly hypocritical about passing judgment on another human being’s actions from the comfort and safety of an armchair. Even more hypocritical is making moral pronouncements on others’ actions having judged them by moral standards that they neither knew nor could conceive.”

This phenomenon has become so common that it has even been given a name: “Presentism” is the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

I believe that’s what Dan Paul has done in his July 9 letter (“Reconciliation When?”). His treatment of Edward Cornwallis (governor of Nova Scotia/Acadia from 1749 to 1752) is one-sided, unbalanced, revisionist and applies today’s standards to 18th century colonial warfare.

Conquest and colonization did not suddenly begin around 1500 when Western Europeans commenced the founding of their overseas empires. Conquest was not just something undertaken by “dead white men.” Many other races and ethnic groups established empires during the course of history.

Conquest and colonization date back to the time when humans first walked erect. Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Macedonians, Romans, Chinese, Arabs, Ashanti, Moguls, Mongols, Angles, Saxons, Normans, Incas, Aztecs, Zulus and Turks — to name but a few — invaded other regions, conquered locals and took over their areas for their own. Western Europeans are simply among the latest groups in this timeless march of conquest. This does not make it right; it is simply an indisputable fact of human history.

Outside the British House of Commons — the “Mother of Parliaments” — stands a magnificent equestrian statue of William the Conqueror. When the Norman duke invaded England in 1066, he expropriated Saxon property, replaced Saxon aristocratic, governmental, judicial and clerical elites and imposed Norman laws, language and way of life on the country. Many Saxons were driven away and many others died. Do we condemn him?

Thomas Jefferson was an American founding father, the principal author of the Declaration of Independence, the third president and one of the most intelligent men of his time and perhaps all time. Yet the man who coined the phrase “all men are created equal” believed that blacks were racially inferior and “as incapable as children.” In his lifetime, he owned more than 600 slaves and even fathered six children to one of them, Sally Hemming. They remained slaves until they came of age. Do we condemn him?

Pre-contact native North and South Americans indulged in warfare, took prisoners and kept them as slaves for small-scale labour, where they were treated like animals: caged, beaten, tortured and starved. John Gyles was captured in present-day Maine in 1689 by Maliseet warriors and kept prisoner for nine years in today’s New Brunswick. His journal provides a good description of slave life under the natives. Do we condemn the Maliseet?

What Hitler and his Nazi henchmen did was wrong today and wrong then: sending Jews and many other “undesirables” to concentration camps where millions died. What the Japanese did in creating the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere concurrently with Hitler’s rise to power was wrong now and wrong then: invading and conquering much of East Asia, killing thousands of non-combatants, imprisoning Korean and Chinese females as “comfort women” to service soldiers sexually and treating prisoners of war (including Canadians) inhumanely through beatings, torture, starvation, denial of medicine and execution.

What Cornwallis did would be wrong today, but it was certainly accepted practice in 18th century colonial and other warfare. Atrocities were not just perpetrated against natives, but against white enemies as well, such as the English fighting the Scots.

By the treaty of 1726, the Mi’kmaq agreed not to attack any British settlements “already made or lawfully to be made.” The founding of Halifax had the full backing of the British government through the Board of Trade and Plantations and was therefore legal. After meeting with Cornwallis personally, Mi’kmaq representatives promised to be friendly with the British. But it was the Mi’kmaq who broke both the treaty and their word when they attacked Halifax, Dartmouth and Lunenburg.

Is it possible that the Mi’kmaq were dupes of disgruntled Acadians, egged on by French officials who had been forced to leave mainland Nova Scotia for Cape Breton by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht? Or were their actions the result of agitation by Abbé Jean-Louis Le Loutre, leader of the Acadian/Mi’kmaq resistance against the British? In a letter to the French Minister of the Marine, responsible for the colonies, Le Loutre wrote: “As we cannot openly oppose the English ventures, I think that we cannot do better than to incite the Mi’kmaq to continue warring on the English; my plan is to persuade the Mi’kmaq to send word to the English that they will not permit new settlements to be made in Acadia .... I shall do my best to make it look to the English as if this plan comes from the Mi’kmaq and that I have no part in it.”

Cornwallis’s orders in reaction to the raids were lawful at the time and he had full authority to issue them. The 18th century was a much harsher time than our own. Ordinary people were subject to a wide range of punishments for common crimes. Hanging was used not only for murderers, but also against perpetrators of property crimes. Children, youths, women and the mentally ill were not exempt from this punishment.

Claims of genocide of the Mi’kmaq made against Cornwallis simply do not hold up under scrutiny. For him to attempt to exterminate the entire Mi’kmaq race, he would have had to have jurisdiction over them. Yet Cornwallis’s authority extended only over mainland Nova Scotia; the rest of traditional Mi’kmaq territory — Cape Breton, Prince Edward Island, eastern New Brunswick and parts of the Gaspé — remained firmly under French control until after Cornwallis departed.

The proposal to remove the statue of Cornwallis or remove his name from features is as silly as proposing the removal of the magnificent equestrian statue of William the Conqueror outside the British House of Commons. The Thomas Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., is one of the finest monuments in that city. Similarly, the statue of Glooscap at Truro is a great tribute to the Mi’kmaq Creator. I am unaware of any movements by Saxons to remove William’s statue, Afro-Americans to dismantle the Jefferson Memorial (or change the name of many cities named after him) or whites to take away the statue of Glooscap.

Rather than accuse Cornwallis, the blame — if there is any — should be focused on the laws of the times. But laws are not concrete objects, and it is much easier to demonize an individual than a concept. We cannot simply apply today’s norms to the past. They would be incomprehensible to 18th century Europeans, who regarded all resources as theirs to be exploited.

After the founding of Port Royal in 1605, European diseases — especially smallpox, measles and tuberculosis — to which the Mi’kmaq had never before been exposed, devastated large segments of the native population whenever they struck, and they struck repeatedly, inflicting losses of 50 per cent or more. Additionally, changes in the Mi’kmaq diet resulting from more European foods weakened their resistance to common diseases they could have shrugged off earlier.

Both French and Mi’kmaq noticed the association between contact and a decline in native population, even if they did not initially identify the cause. Membertou, the great Mi’kmaq chief, told Acadian chronicler Marc Lescarbot that when he was young, his people had been “as thickly planted there as the hairs upon his head,” but since the arrival of the French, their numbers had diminished dramatically. The comparable course of action to removing Cornwallis’s statue is to destroy the Port Royal Habitation near Granville Ferry, where the French occupation of Nova Scotia started.

Additional thousands of Mi’kmaq deaths followed as a result of the disastrous French attempt to retake Louisbourg from the New Englanders who had captured it in 1745. The fleet sent the next year, under the Duc d’Anville, anchored at Birch Cove in Bedford Basin, where hundreds of sick and dying Frenchmen were put ashore to recover. Thousands of Mi’kmaq caught their diseases and spread them throughout the province. Between one-third and one-half of the entire aboriginal population of mainland Nova Scotia may have died during the fall and winter of 1746-47; thousands more than were killed under Cornwallis’s edicts.

Obviously, the only appropriate action is to dismantle Fortress Louisbourg, as its recapture was the reason why D’Anville’s fleet came here. And while we’re at it, let’s destroy Fort Beauséjour and any other remnants or reminders of the European conquest and colonization of Canada. Next, let’s move on to the United States, Central America, the Caribbean, South America and anywhere else Europeans colonized.

I personally deplore what happened to the Mi’kmaq, but no one can change it. If we eradicate Cornwallis’s name, where do we ever stop?

John Boileau is the author of several books and articles about Nova Scotia’s history.